How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica

smeg , 6 months ago

I found this so interesting that I then went and watched the full version, absolutely fascinating view into how you make a video game in the brave new 3d world of the 90s!

i_ben_fine , 7 months ago

I want more Ars Technica War Stories. They’re the reason I subscribed to the channel.

Astaroth , 7 months ago

Already saw this a year or two ago, it’s a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it yet does watch it

iturnedintoanewt , 7 months ago

This made Naughty Dog the pioneers of the streaming levels, I guess.

pastel_de_airfryer , 7 months ago

They also pulled a really cool hack on Jak and Dexter. They were able to hack into the PS1 chip hidden away in the PS2 for backwards compatibility to get some extra processing power!

vrighter , 7 months ago

source? I’d really like to read about this

pastel_de_airfryer , 7 months ago

I read about it over a decade ago. Something about the game being difficult to emulate because of it. Now I can’t find anything :(

TwilightVulpine , 7 months ago

Their engineers were crazy good to pull off this sort of stuff.

million , 7 months ago

Another interesting fact concerning the ps1 chip, Sony used it as an Io controller so backwards compatibility was essentially built in to the design of the ps2

PlayStation 2 software is distributed on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. In addition, the console can play audio CDs and DVD movies, and is backwards compatible with original PlayStation games. This is accomplished through the inclusion of the original PlayStation’s CPU which also serves as the PS2’s I/O processor, clocked at 36.864 MHz in PS2 mode.

From Wikipedia

Donjuanme , 7 months ago

That was a fun watch. Hard to believe naughty dog started with 5 people and a million dollars worth of hardware